Solomon Frank in Costume for his Create Space residency showing.

Interview with Solomon Frank

Describe your sound practice?

I strive for my work to sit at the meeting point of the sacred and the silly. I don’t think the world takes silly things seriously enough. Taking silly things seriously underpins much of my practice, whether that’s critically examining singing dogs on America’s Got Talent, collaborating musically with dogs, or turning the clarinet into a glorified fart machine. I guess as a mirror goal, I take serious things sillily.

I have been obsessively making work about the clarinet for most of my life. Assigned the instrument at age eight, the clarinet has become deeply entangled with my identity. It carries the weight of the Western classical canon, a tradition I simultaneously love, question, and undermine. Through extended performance techniques, homemade reeds, tubes, hoses, balloons, watering cans, pumps, vacuum cleaners, and other unlikely attachments, I work with the clarinet in an expanded form, transforming it into something unstable, independently agentive, and expressive beyond its intended design.

My background is as a classically trained composer, but the realities of being an artist in the twenty-first century have led me toward a highly interdisciplinary practice spanning performance, improvisation, live art, ecology, and research. I am interested in how sound is used to mediate and generate relationships between humans, animals, technologies, and environments. Whether working with dogs, orchids, future beings, or modified instruments, I use fiction, humour, and speculative frameworks as tools for listening differently and questioning assumptions and assumed hierarchies about music, creativity, and who gets to participate in them.

I often describe my work as “dystopian nostalgia for the present.” It reflects on the precarious place of art music in a world shaped by corporate technocrats, TikTok algorithms, ecological crisis, and celebrity culture. Through experimentation, play, and discipline I seek to create work that is both stupid and profound: work that frames and embeds the radical, the avant-garde, and the hyper intellectual within and alongside the lowest art, the base, and the ridiculous.

I particularly resonate with this quote by composer and researcher David Dunn where he explains his synthesis of practices as a “classical” composer and ecomusicologist: “Rather than focusing upon the special talents of a composer at ‘expressing’ self through a dramatic structure and highlighting their compositional training and skill at doing so, this is a tradition that is more interested in making a form of music that draws attention to the structure of auditory perception itself and/or issues of sound as an organizing factor in both human and non-human living systems.” (Dunn 2008)

How has PSpace been a part of that story?

I first worked with Performance Space as part of the covid era Queer Development Program. I then performed an ensemble work called Human’s Got Talent (naughty girlies unite XD) at Day For Night in 2022. Human’s Got Talent (naughty girilies unite XD) was a piece that I wrote in collaboration with a hyper intelligent talking dog from the year 2456 and an AI art bot from year 2122 as an audition for the intertemporal TV talent contest Human’s Got Talent. Over the last two years, Performance Space and Sydney Opera House have supported the development of my new opera The Castration of Uranus.

We're launching an Experimental Sound Program. Why is it important to invest in development opportunities for experimental sound artists?

Experimental sound artists are often working at the edges of established disciplines, developing new ways of listening, creating, and understanding the world. Unlike many artforms, sound has a unique capacity to exceed easy categorisation. Geographers Anja Kanngieser and Michael Gallagher describe sound as possessing a “radical incommensurability” (Gallagher, Kanngieser and Prior 2017), an ability to resist stable interpretation, measurement, and representation. It is precisely this quality that makes sound such a powerful medium for artistic experimentation and innovation.

Within the arts landscape (and broader society), sound has often been overlooked in favour of visual ways of knowing and documenting the world. Sound is not passive; it is an active force that shapes attention, memory, emotion, behaviour, and relationships between people, environments, and other species. Within the Australian funding ecology, there seems to be an undervaluing and an underinvestment of artists working with experimental music and sound practices. Some of the most talented sound artists, composers, and musicians I know often abandon NSW and Australia all together due to this particular funding gap.

Can you describe what a rich, vibrant experimental sound landscape in Australia looks like to you?

I think there’s often a perception within new music and experimental music that Australia is a conservative backwater, and that serious composers or sound artists eventually need to leave for Europe or North America to study, find collaborators, and build sustainable careers. From an economic perspective, there’s certainly some truth to that. We have a smaller funding pool, fewer institutions, and fewer large-scale opportunities than many international centres.

At the same time, I think Australian experimental sound practice has unique strengths that emerge precisely from these conditions. Australian artists often work with a particular irreverence and self-awareness. We live in a country shaped by a brutal colonial past and present, and I think many artists here instinctively distrust inherited hierarchies and cultural authority. Rather than preserving the Western canon on a pedestal, there’s a tendency to poke at it, dismantle it, reassemble it, and ask who it serves.

I also think our ecology plays a profound role. Australian artists are surrounded by landscapes, species, and environmental conditions that are unlike almost anywhere else in the world. That inevitably shapes how we listen and what kinds of questions we ask through sound. For me, some of the most exciting work being made here engages with place, ecology, and more-than-human relationships in ways that feel genuinely distinctive.

Also, because the arts sector is relatively small, artists are often forced to work across disciplines. Composers become performers, producers, researchers, curators, theatre-makers, and community organisers. While that can be exhausting and makes explaining your work to your grandma kind of difficult, it also creates fertile conditions for experimentation. A rich experimental sound landscape isn’t one that simply reproduces international trends. It’s one where artists have the resources and freedom to develop work that is locally grounded, interdisciplinary, adventurous, and unapologetically strange. I think Australia already has the artists capable of doing that—we just need to continue investing in them.

Image in Header: Daphne Nguyen.